Burning your own Trisquel USB disk
=================================
In this explanation, "USB disk" refers to any bootable USB memory device, such
as the official wallet-sized card from the FSF, or a USB stick, or USB adapter
for an SD/MMC flash memory.
This directory contains the exact image file we burned onto the USB Membership
cards:
-rw-r--r-- 1 az az 4009754624 Jul 2 15:43 trisquel-6.0-4GB-membercard.dd
-rw-r--r-- 1 az az 65 Jul 16 17:56 trisquel-6.0-4GB-membercard.dd.md5
You can download the image file and burn it onto any USB disk which
has at least the amount of available space needed (4009754624 bytes)
using these commands:
umount /dev/sdN1 # also /dev/sdN2 etc if the disk has extra partitions
dd if=trisquel-6.0-4GB-membercard.dd of=/dev/sdN bs=3932656
md5sum /dev/sdN
where sdN refers to the device name supplied by the system when you connect
the USB disk to your computer, e.g., /dev/sdc or /dev/sdd. Be careful here if
you have more than one disk attached, to be sure you are copying to the USB
disk and not one of your other disks.
Note that the dd command overwrites any partitioning previously on the
USB disk, so don't do this if you have anything you wish to keep on the
disk. Also note that this disk image is unpartitioned, meaning that it
mounts as /dev/sdN rather than /dev/sdN1 and /dev/sdN2 as previous versions
of the member card did.
If the disk is larger than the image, use this command instead to check the
integrity of the data:
dd if=/dev/sdN bs=16777216 count=239 | md5sum
239+0 records in
239+0 records out
4009754624 bytes (4.0 GB) copied ac51f148340c9a9bca6647b080f8af36 -
, 161.32 s, 24.9 MB/s
(In this example, the output of md5sum was interposed in the output of
dd; this is an accident of timing.)
The md5sum test can only be used immediately after burning the image. Once the
system mounts the USB disk it will probably rewrite some of the sectors on
the disk (file system metadata), changing the MD5 signature.